Renowned architect confronted by resurrection of early work at Middlebury College

World-renowned architect confronted by his career-launching 30-year-old sculpture at Middlebury College

Nov. 16, 2013

Artist Vito Acconci does not like the word 'art' nor does he believe his creations are 'art' instead he thinks of his public, interactive, three-dimensional structures as architecture. / EMILY McMANAMY/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

The sketch by Vito Acconci was made in 1983, when Acconci was a visiting professor of studio art at Middlebury College. It was a study for his piece, :Way Station I,' which was vandalized and finally rebuilt, 30 years later. Acconci's 'shadow figure' is on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. / SALLY POLLAK/FREE PRESS

The sketch by Vito Acconci was made in 1983, when Acconci was a visiting professor of studio art at Middlebury College. It was a study for his piece, :Way Station I,' which was vandalized and finally rebuilt, 30 years later. Acconci's 'shadow figure' is on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. / SALLY POLLAK/FREE PRESS

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MIDDLEBURY — For Vito Acconci, the reconstruction of an early work represents a chance to make improvements, refine elements, rework problems.

For the liberal arts college that commissioned his piece, its revitalization is a “teaching moment” that concerns freedom of expression at a place whose existence depends upon the open exchange of ideas.

“Way Station I (Study Chamber)” was made by Acconci, a New York City-based architect and designer, in 1983 for Middlebury College. It is the first public piece Acconci was commissioned to make and the first — and only — work of his to be wrecked by vandals. (Acconci has public pieces around the world.)

To recognize Acconci’s short-lived and controversial creation, the college has unveiled a replica of the work and mounted an accompanying exhibit at the art museum. In the less than 2 1⁄2 years it was on campus, “Way Station I” was hit with food, used as a toilet, defaced by graffiti, and finally torched during commencement weekend, 1985.

Acconci sees the remake as an intriguing and tempting opportunity for change, even as the piece has been relocated by the museum: on exhibit.

“Anytime you do something, you should outdo what’s done,” Acconci said a week and a half ago, looking at the structure for the first time since its completion. “I made mistakes. I don’t want to preserve my mistakes.”

“Way Station I,” a college administrator says, tells an important story about Middlebury College and Acconci’s career, one that can only be told with historical accuracy and artistic relevance if the piece is essentially the original.

“I saw the erasing of the Vito Acconci as a form of censorship,” said Richard Saunders, director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art. “People saying I don’t really care for that — and therefore inflaming others to take action to remove it because you don’t like it. That’s a horrible message to send to people.”

Saunders has been working to get the remains out of storage and the piece rebuilt since he arrived at Middlebury three months after Acconci’s piece was burned. Acconci has had misgivings throughout, Saunders said.

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“He’s always questioning,” Saunders said. “That’s part of what makes him such a fascinating person.”

Art vs. architecture

In the course of 50 years as an imaginative thinker and a creator working in the arts — from poet to performance artist; film/video projects to landscape designer — Acconci has moved from using himself as a kind of subject of exploration to making large-scale public pieces. This latter work needs to be created collaboratively and used publicly in order to be fully realized, he said.

“I really don’t think public stuff should come from one person,” Acconci said by telephone the other day. “It should come from a number of people disagreeing. A number of people come up with something that one person would never come up with himself or herself.”

Working with colleagues at Acconci Studio in Brooklyn, he has designed subway stations in New York City; a terminal at Philadelphia International Airport where the floor rises in curved structures to an upper level (people can sit on the construction); parks in Europe, including a large bowl/amphitheater with connecting bridges on a river in Graz, Austria; and “Fence-on-the-Loose” in Toronto, where a black steel fence at an apartment complex becomes a public hangout.

Acconci estimates 10 percent of the proposals that emerge from his studio become built work.

“Not everybody pays attention to architecture but everybody knows architecture,” he said. “They’re always going through architecture. They’re living in architecture. At first I thought architecture is just for rich people but it’s not that at all. Without architecture, people would have to always build a campfire to keep warm.”

Tuesday, Acconci traveled to Helsinki for a project with electronic musician Sasu Ripatti. While their collaboration was largely undefined, Acconci said, it would be centered around sound with voice and projections.

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Yet Acconci says words are the only thing he knows how to use.

He can’t draw or build, Acconci says. He has no interest in abstraction. He cares about precision. Specificity is vital to his projects.

The distinction between art and architecture is important as it concerns Acconci’s work 30 years ago at Middlebury College.

“Architecture is very different from art,” Acconci said. “The people who commission architecture can really change whatever they want. It’s not like an art project. Of course, when ‘Way Station’ was done, it was an art project. ...

“The art attitude, I think, is always don’t renovate. Do what was first done. That seems kind of silly to me. Because if I think I didn’t do it right, I would love a second chance to do it. For me, change is much more important than preservation.”

'What bothered you so?'

Acconci was hired by Middlebury College for its January term in 1983. He taught a course called Art in Public Spaces and built “Way Station I” along a pathway in five days for $5,000.

The piece, about the size and shape of an outhouse or tool shed (as described by Middlebury art historian John Hunisak), descends a couple feet into the ground. Inside is a desk and seat at which Acconci imagined students stopping to study or read on their way to class.

(He wishes the steps had a lower rise, the desk was on a diagonal, the steel frame was narrower, the extra space nonexistent.)

Exterior panels show nine playing cards, aces, 2s and 3s. Within the structure, letters painted on the panels form the words God, man and dog. The door is painted in symbols of different nation’s flags, including the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

A figure Acconci sketched on graph paper as he conceived “Way Station” was imagined as a kind of “shadow figure” that might be a hint to people that the space was for sitting, he said.

The drawing, on exhibit at the college art museum, looks like a person on a toilet or Rodin’s sculpture, “The Thinker,” Acconci said. Maybe it is the work’s resemblance to an outhouse that compelled people to treat it like a toilet, he suggested.

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Saunders gives this notion little credence.

“If they could get into Middlebury they should understand the difference between a structure like that and a toilet,” he said. “I think that was more of a message than anything.”

Acconci wishes he’d been on campus when the backlash against his work took expression.

“I would’ve tried to have a conversation,” he said. “What bothered you so?”

That question remains mostly unanswered. The mystery surrounding who is responsible for the destruction of “Way Station I” also remains unsolved.

“I think quite honestly the dean’s office didn’t want to know who did it because they were glad it happened,” said Hunisak, who was chairman of the history of art and architecture department in 1983.

“The administration may have commissioned it, but when the storm of protest arose they went into their storm cellar,” he said.

If a car had been torched at the student union, Saunders said, “you can be darn sure that somebody would’ve followed up.”

After his first public piece burned, Acconci was surprised to learn steel is flammable.

“To me it meant, ‘Wow, they were really angry or really naive,’” Acconci said. “Maybe as naive as I was about steel.”

The scorched playing cards from the 1983 piece are hanging in the college art museum, part of the current exhibit called “Vito Acconci Thinking Space.” A section of the display examines the controversy surrounding “Way Station I.” A room in the museum is devoted to Acconci’s career in the subsequent decades.

The two overlap in Acconci’s imagination.

“This is one of the only chances where an act of God, in the person of students, destroyed something for me,” Acconci said.

He sees “Way Station” and thinks, “Oh, God, I wish I had thought of ...”

'I have to change direction'

About a decade before Acconci arrived at Middlebury College for his winter-term project, he made a piece in New York that also unfolded over a few weeks in January. For “Seedbed,” Acconci built a ramp that extended from the center of the gallery to one end of it.

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Before the gallery opened in the morning, he positioned himself in the space beneath the ramp. There, he masturbated for eight hours, connected to the gallery above by a sound system. The attempt was to build sexual fantasies related in some way to the sounds of the visitors, Acconci said at a Nov. 7 lecture at Middlebury College.

After a time, his interest shifted from live action/performance pieces, he said. “I hated the word performance,” Acconci said. “It’s a theater word rather than a space word.”

By the time Acconci arrived at Middlebury College, 11 years after “Seedbed,” the projects he was interested in had taken on a more public dimension. They concerned people as users and participants of his work. He also wanted to move, literally, underground.

“Through whatever career I’ve had, I’ve always thought now I have to change direction,” Acconci said. “Now I have to go elsewhere.”

About three weeks into Acconci’s January 1983 stay at Middlebury, an article in the student newspaper by Thomas Sullivan described what was happening on campus:

“Unless your senses have been vacationing with your academic drive this winter term, you’ve probably noticed that something is going on around here.” Sullivan wrote. “A car on Proctor Hall terrace; a door along the path to the Social Dining Units; a more ‘human’ entrance to a Johnson bathroom; an inundation of posters, flags and jeans ... The man behind this curious project is Vito Acconci.”

One day, Acconci and a group of students started digging a hole by a path on a remote part of campus, near where McCardell Bicentennial Hall now stands. Although the piece was commissioned by the college, there was no campus awareness or discussion in advance of building “Way Station,” according to Saunders and Hunisak.

Hunisak recalls coming upon this construction scene.

“I said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’” Hunisak recalled. “That was the first I knew about this monument he was making.”

'Like a cemetery'

Middlebury College is a very different campus than it was 30 years ago. There has been major construction since then, including the 1992 building of the Mahaney Center for the Arts, site of the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

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In 1994, the college established a public art program whereby one percent of the budget for building and renovation projects over $1 million is used to acquire art. The Committee on Art in Public Places, which helps make determinations about what art to buy and where to place it, includes faculty, staff, trustees and students.

As chairperson for 10 years of the public art committee, Hunisak gained insight — in retrospect — into the Acconci controversy. He discovered what he called an “almost toxic resistance” to anything students considered an invasion of their space.

He described two incidents:

In 2002, before installing the Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture near the art museum, a plywood mock-up of the work was made. It was to be placed at various sites to help determine the work’s permanent location. The first night it was set out at a proposed site, it was destroyed by students, Hunisak said.

“It was astonishing,” he recalled. “They said we had no right to destroy their space.”

By contrast, in advance of placing what Hunisak said is the most significant work of public art on campus, “Smog” by Tony Smith, a base of blue stones was laid out. This was done while the area around Bicentennial Hall was a construction site.

“In a way, we claimed it before anybody had played Frisbee there,” Hunisak said.

The Acconci incident served as a kind of catalyst for creating the public art program, Saunders said. The reinstallment of “Way Station” means the piece can be seen not in isolation but as part of a collection of 22 works of public art on campus, including “Love” and “Smog.”

Yet for Acconci, the site of “Way Station” by the museum, where it is visible from inside framed between birch trees, is probably the biggest mistake of the remake, he said. (Acconci approved the siting, according to the college.)

The original work was placed by a path for a reason: to be used by people, in particular students.

Now, on a manicured rise in an enclave of art, the recreated “Way Station” will be viewed as belonging to a sculpture garden. Acconci says he’s always disliked sculpture parks, and thinks they’re disconnected from the everyday life of college students.

“Sculpture gardens always seem like cemeteries,” he said. “I wanted stuff to be on a street, where people don’t even have to think of it as art. But, oh, maybe we can go in here. ...

“It was literally on a walkway through campus,” Acconci said of the original “Way Station.” “I didn’t want it to be something to be looked at. I wanted people to be inside it. They see this, go down a few steps, and make some last-minute study.”

During his recent campus visit, Acconci was asked by Saunders what piece he might imagine making if he could create a new one at Middlebury College.

“At this point,” he said, “I’m still thinking about a piece from 30 years ago.”